Syncopation, a new play by Allan Knee about the dance-inspired romance between two blue collar New Yorkers, will find a home on Broadway Oct. 2, when it begins previews at an as-yet-unnamed theatre.

John Tillinger, a frequent hand at small-cast plays (Say Goodnight, Gracie, Tea at Five), will direct. Vaud E. Massarsky produces. Casting is to be announced later.

The plot of the play follows the romance of "an impassioned meat packer and a soul-searching seamstress in turn of the century Manhattan." The two find love in a dance studio in the Lower East Side. "As the characters change and grow," reads press material, "their relationship shifts not unlike the syncopated beats of the ragtime music that accompanies them."

John O'Connell provides choreography, which is said to express a "physical vocabulary that serves as a metaphor for the emerging feminism, immigrant success and the fulfillment of the American dream of the era."

Allan Knee wrote the book for the upcoming Broadway musical Little Women, which will star Sutton Foster. Little Women will play on Broadway in late 2004 after tryouts at Theatre Previews at Duke in North Carolina and New Haven's Shubert Theatre.

Designing Syncopation are John Lee Beatty (sets), Brian Macdevitt (lighting) and John Gromada (sound). Syncopation premiered at the Long Wharf Theater in 1999. David Chandler and Lorca Simons starred in that staging. A production at The George Street Playhouse in New Brunswick, NJ, followed. In spring 2000, Syncopation was on the fast track for an Off-Broadway mounting, but a theatre logjam scotched those plans. At the time, the project had different producers, Ted Tulchin and Kenneth Waissman, and a different director, Pamela Berlin.